This year marks 100 years since the passing of Franz Kafka. We are grateful to alumnus Michael Steiner (1958) for this blog, which describes the fortuitus events that led to his mother, a neice of Kafka, donating her share of his original manuscripts to the Bodleian Library.

I arrived at Lincoln in 1958 to do law, having done National Service as an army interpreter in Russian, on a course where my predecessors included Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and Eddie George. The College had turned down a request to let me arrive in 1956, which would have enabled me to avoid National Service, the abolition of which had been announced in 1956, on the grounds that it thought National Service was usually a good thing for people leaving school. In my case the College did me a big favour.

At some time in my first term I started chatting in Hall to Tony Werner (1958), who was studying languages. We discovered that he too had been on the Joint Services School for Languages, but while he had been sent for a year to London University, I had been sent to Cambridge. When he mentioned he was being tutored at Magdalen in German, I told him that my mother was a niece of Franz Kafka. After World War Two ended, the closest surviving relatives of Kafka were four nieces: my mother, Marianna Steiner; her cousin Gerti Kaufmann, then living in India; and two nieces, Vera Saudkova and Helena Kostrouchova, who lived in Czechoslovakia.

My parents and I had left Prague on the last train the Germans allowed to leave in April 1939, but had returned in 1945, only to escape again after the Communist putsch in December 1948. My mother represented the Kafka Estate after World War Two. In 1958 my mother was concerned to find a suitable place to deposit the original Kafka manuscripts, which had been saved by his friend Max Brod (who had disregarded Kafka’s request to destroy the mansucripts) and to ensure access to them by scholars with a view to a new critical edition of all of them.

Tony relayed this information to his tutor at Magdalen, Malcolm Pasley. Pasley was a Kafka fanatic at a time when Kafka was only just starting to become well known and discussed. Pasley couldn’t believe his luck and invited me for tea. Shortly afterwards he met my parents and there started a long and fruitful friendship. Pasley conceived the idea of the manuscripts being lodged at the Bodleian. Initially the four nieces lent the manuscripts, but subsequently Mrs Kaufmann and my mother bequeathed their one third shares to the Library, so that today it owns two thirds. The names of Mrs Kaufmann and my mother appear on the list of major benefactors on the Library wall.

This year was the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death and the Bodleian organised a very good exhibition entitled ‘Kafka. Making of an icon’ which will be running until October before moving to New York. In addition there has been a programme of events in Oxford.

One of the most important consequences of the manuscripts finding a home in Oxford was the critical edition of all of the works, contributed to by a number of scholars and the recent digitalisation of the manuscripts, enabling wide reaching access to them worldwide.

All of this started with a chat in Hall!